“When it came to the end of high school, I had no interest in anything but playing in a band – and I managed to find a band to do that with,” he continues. Having no interest in University at the time, Ronchetti had a different idea in mind.
I discovered who Cliff Burton was and that was it, all I wanted to do was be Cliff Burton, with my distortion pedal, imitating his solos.” Instead, they were able to set up bass guitar lessons, which pushed Ronchetti in that direction. “At school I was waiting for electric guitar lessons to come about,” Ronchetti says, but they weren’t on offer. This had such an impact on Ronchetti that he decided he wanted to learn how to play the electric guitar himself. “The thing that stuck with me was how cool it would be to be a Metallica fan,” he tells me, “I was fourteen and I was like ‘yeah, I’m going to be a Metallica fan’. Ronchetti soon found a style of music – and a band – that really appealed to him though. Everything from thrash to hard rock to classic to pop.” “I went to see my Uncle in Spain his apartment was literally laced with cassettes, vinyl and CDs. At break times, lunchtimes – jamming with friends playing Green Day songs.” His musical horizons had been broadened by what seems like a pretty pivotal visit to a relative abroad. Echoing the stories of other composers I’ve spoken to in terms of wanting to be in a band, he divulges: “When I was in high school, I started playing in bands, every spare minute. Though it’s Ronchetti’s first game soundtrack, he’s hardly a newcomer to the world of music.
It’s a game with beautiful visuals, tough-but-fair, rewarding gameplay and some incredibly impressive atmosphere – thanks largely to the audio aspect of the game, which Ronchetti was responsible for.
His admiration for the work of different composers – Alan Silvestri, Ennio Morricone, Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Carpenter and Max Richter are all mentioned – is infectious and sets us off on all kinds of tangents (Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The Thing is named as his favourite film – which perhaps also explains why Dead Space is such an important touchstone for Ronchetti too), but we were actually speaking to discuss his work on the music for newly-released pixel-art boss rush indie game, Eldest Souls. As Ronchetti tells me, “I love discovering composers to films they’re like the rock stars of the modern composer.” Ronchetti’s curiosity about the power of music to create atmosphere and ambience – terror, even – then led him to films and the same realisation that someone specifically created the musical accompaniment to the onscreen action – and it became a passion. “I’m just walking down a corridor and I’m f**king petrified,” he continues, laughing and even politely apologising for swearing, “I’m just terrified and that’s when I started actively listening, thinking ‘okay, there’s a violin in the background – I wonder who did that?'” “I remember playing Dead Space and just thinking ‘why is it so scary?’,” Sergio Ronchetti tells me of the first time he realised that someone must have been responsible for the music found in video games.
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